Neil Sheehan: Vietnam: It Never Seems to End

Neil Sheehan, in the NYT (Aug. 27, 2004):

Thirteen years after
the 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, announced that America had "kicked
the Vietnam syndrome'' with his crushing expulsion of Saddam Hussein's forces
from Kuwait, the war in Vietnam is back. Its memories and divisions are reverberating
as forcefully as ever in the campaign between his son, George Walker Bush, the
43rd president, and Senator John Kerry.

Seeking to convince voters that
he would make a better commander-in-chief in the war on terror than Mr. Bush has
been, Mr. Kerry placed his status as a Vietnam War hero front and center, only
to find his reputation under assault by a group calling itself the Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth. As well as can be determined, the accusations are unfounded
and Mr. Kerry deserved his medals.

Mr. Bush has his own problem with Vietnam;
he did not serve there. In the spring of 1968, when he was a senior at Yale, casualties
in Vietnam were averaging 414 killed and 1,160 seriously wounded a week. Draft
calls were running commensurately high to replace the fallen. In contrast to the
present, when the National Guard and the Reserves are ransacked for replacements
for Iraq, both institutions were safe havens during the Vietnam era. Mr. Bush
used his father's political influence to leapfrog the waiting list into the Texas
Air National Guard.

One must be careful in pointing a finger at those who
avoided service in Vietnam. Many, like President Clinton, had moral objections
to the war. The gimmicks they used to stay out of it were tawdry, but they acted
from motives of conscience. Mr. Bush - like his father's vice president, Dan Quayle,
who sheltered in the Indiana National Guard, and his own vice president, Dick
Cheney, who obtained five draft deferments - are in a different category. From
what can be discerned, none of them opposed the Vietnam War. Had the younger Mr.
Bush not stood aside from the central, transforming event of his youthful years,
his performance as president might have been closer to that of the wise and capable
commander-in-chief he claims to be but has not been. He might have learned a lesson
from Vietnam - do not become involved in an unnecessary war.

Unnoticed
in the controversy over the Swift Boat group's accusations is an undercurrent
that lingers from the war. The men who fought in Vietnam and survived came back
as divided as the public at home. Most suffered in silence, then picked up their
lives and went on. But some, like John Kerry, were so disillusioned that they
felt they had to do something to stop the war. Another minority persisted in their
faith that the war could be won, that America is an exception to history and can
do no wrong.

The nation has yet to come to grips with what really happened
in Vietnam, and Mr. Kerry's accusers are among those who simply cannot and never
will. They are driven by more than a political desire to further the fortunes
of George Bush. Their remarks make clear that what they really hold against Mr.
Kerry are his antiwar activities after his return and his testimony then that
atrocities were being committed in Vietnam. They regard these as undermining the
war effort and casting aspersions on their service. "We won the battle,''
one of Mr. Kerry's accusers, former Navy commander Adrian Lonsdale, said. "Kerry
went home and lost the war for us.'' The group's second television commercial
focuses on this issue, running bits of old news film of Mr. Kerry's testimony
in a 1971 Senate hearing, excerpting his remarks to twist their meaning....